His Best Shot

By

John Wilmerding

December 31, 2011

Americansnow recognize Yosemite Valley as one of the wondrous natural spaces on the continent. Carleton Watkins (1829-1916) was for a time partially overshadowed by his more familiar contemporaries Eadweard Muybridge and William Henry Jackson. But with the recent publication of Weston Naef's full catalog of Watkins's mammoth plate photographs, we can see that this photographer was not only prolific, but also creator of some of the most beautiful landscape photographs in America. Born in New York, but based in California for most of his long career, Watkins produced nearly 10,000 images, including some 6,500 stereo views, small-format pictures, and more than 1,200 mammoth plate photographs. Within this oeuvre he took more pictures of Yosemite than any other subject.

In the early 1860s, three major figures came to be associated with the fate of Yosemite and how we would see and experience it. The pioneering landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted, with construction under way for his Central Park in New York, had been hired in 1863 to manage the Mariposa estate and mining operations near the valley that belonged to the explorer John C. Frémont. This led to Olmsted's appointment to the Yosemite Commission two years later and discussions about preserving this wilderness area. Watkins had been asked in 1860 to photograph the Mariposa tract. When he saw the staggering scale and breathtaking beauty of the landscape, he had a huge camera made to take 18-by-22-inch glass-plate negatives, and returned the following year on his first serious campaign of work in the valley. The results were exhibited in New York, and a congressman showed some of the photographs to President Abraham Lincoln. Amid the intense distractions of the Civil War, in 1864 Lincoln signed a bill ceding Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa grove to the state of California, thus protecting the land and eventually leading to its designation as a national park.

Watkins returned to photograph the valley extensively in 1865 and 1866. Because the massive fissure in the earth's crust runs largely east-west, the valley floor is exposed to sunlight from dawn to dusk, a phenomenon notably exploited by Albert Bierstadt, who painted the sun flooding the space at eye level. The photographer found other scenery across California and the West for his camera over the next decade, but was drawn back to Yosemite in the late 1870s. There has been some thought that the later views tend toward repetition, but seeing the full range now reveals an acute sensitivity to compositional adjustment and refinement in his sequencing of images.

Fourteen of his mammoth plates are devoted to El Capitan, a massive cliff on the north side of the valley near its western end, the principal entrance for visitors today. More than half of these are horizontal in format, showing distant views along the riverbed, often with a meadow or water in the foreground. Six are vertical, of one or more of the promontories close up, including this print now at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., that is thought to date between 1878 and 1881.

‘A photographer returns to a subject and achieves an image of subtle grandeur.’

Watkins's vision was a fusion of art and science. The conventions of pictorial composition derive from Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School and author of "Essay on American Scenery" (1836). He declared that the essential components of a landscape were mountains ("the most conspicuous objects"), water ("without which every landscape is defective"), trees ("of every stage of vegetable life and decay") and sky ("the soul of all scenery"), all present in Yosemite. Two decades later, aesthetic taste had moved toward an emphasis on precision and specificity. Asher Durand urged artists to "draw with scrupulous fidelity" and take note how one tree "differs from those of other species." About the same time, Henry David Thoreau was repeatedly celebrating the virtues of different trees, whether pines, beech or birch. Watkins also loved trees, making stark portraits of the redwood, Arbutus, buckeye, sugar pine, cactus, Yucca, Douglas fir and giant mariposa, which he declared "A Perfect Tree."

The medium of photography supremely suited Watkins in capturing nature's elements with utmost clarity. Improvements to the camera also coincided with the advancement during midcentury of the natural sciences, epitomized by Charles Darwin, who championed "the noble science of Geology." The so-called wet-plate process employed by Watkins involved a collodion emulsion holding light-sensitive silver salts, which was applied to the large glass plate for exposure (for a minute or more) before drying, then developed and printed on albumenized paper. This produced the sharp details and warm mahogany tones in the resulting photograph.

Watkins had photographed this scene a decade earlier, catching the cliff face alternatively in flat or bright sunlight, then with varying degrees of shadow advancing across its surface. While some of the views are more overtly dramatic in effect, this image stands out for its subtle grandeur, achieved through a calculated angle of vision and careful framing of the landscape elements. The evergreens extend across the middle ground, creating a balanced juxtaposition between the lighter rock wall in the upper half of the view and darker mass of trees, shrubbery and stream below. When he revisited the site, Watkins tried subtly different camera positions and times of the day, here selecting a midday hour for his exposure. El Capitan's vertical profile divides the upper expanse almost evenly. He waited till sunlight filled the front rock face and shadow fell across its eastern flank. The single tallest pine stands at the exact intersection of these contrasting planes. Three evergreens silhouetted against the light ground to the left balance the darker trio on the right. Below, one bare sunlit tree trunk focuses the eye at the center. The composition set, the view was now ready for the camera.

—Mr. Wilmerding, a Princeton art historian, first wrote about Watkins in "American Light: The Luminist Movement" (1980) for the National Gallery of Art.

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